Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Sit Down You're Rockin' the Boat - Don Henley

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym6NRwF9apA]


This song was originally from the musical Guys and Dolls, but I think Henley nails it with this recording from the Leap of Faith Soundtrack. The beats of the snare and kick are backwards for a vast majority of the song, and the syncopation of the different parts is completely atypical, giving the song a unique feel. It's really hard to find the groove here, but once you do, you can't let it go. It really goes to show that something different, flipping the conventional way the drums are played in this case, can change things up for the better.


The song was a hit on the Adult Contemporary charts for Henley, hitting #13. It's also the big hit from Guys and Dolls. The song is the show's 11 o'clock number, which I learned about today. It's a theater term that refers to the "big show-stopping" song that occurs late in the second act of a musical. Shows once started around 8:30 PM regularly, and this song would occur at, you guessed it, 11:00 PM. The movie in which Henley's version appears was one I had mostly forgotten about and still can't pick out any details from, except that it starred Steve Martin, Meatloaf, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

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